Archive for the tag 'Drought'

Will the lessons of responding to the famine in the Horn of Africa be learned for the Sahel?

January 25th, 2012

Another famine is looming in Africa’s Sahel region – the third drought in the area in the last 10 years.  And the big question facing the international community is whether the lessons of not responding soon enough to the drought in the Horn will be learned – and acted upon – here.

We know already that the European Union has taken a lead.  And DFID has announced that it is sending therapeutic food to help 68,000 children in Chad, Mali and Niger, three of the countries worst affected by poor harvests.

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Disasters in numbers – 2011 wasn’t that bad a year, just 207 million people affected

January 22nd, 2012

Welcome to 2012.  However, this year is unlikely to be better than 2011.

The thing about major disasters is that whilst we don’t know exactly where the next one is going to hit, we can be certain that there will be a next one – and even take some well-informed guesses about where it might hit.

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Approach to dealing with famine and crises has to change say Oxfam and Save the Children

January 19th, 2012

A report this week by Oxfam and Save the Children has concluded that many lives were lost, livelihoods unnecessarily ruined and a lot of donor money wasted because the early warnings about the famine in the Horn of Africa were not heeded and not acted upon.

Readers of this blog will not be surprised by this conclusion, as we wrote back in July how the early warnings had been ignored for a year by the international community with the result that food aid had to be flown in by the 747-load, when other, more cost-effective and more life-saving, procedures could otherwise have been followed.

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Famine looms in the Sahel, but $1 invested now can save up to $7 later

December 7th, 2011

European Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva warned yesterday that the Sahel region of West Africa was in danger of slipping into famine and that help should be provided now – indeed it was already being provided by the EU.

She said that it was not only ethically and morally right to send aid now, before things reached crisis point, but also cheaper in the long run as disaster risk reduction (DRR) is dramatically more cost-effective than responding to disasters.

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Al Shabaab bans 16 Western aid agencies from areas it controls in famine-hit Somalia

December 4th, 2011

The population in war-torn Somalia received another blow last week as Al Shabaab banned 16 aid agencies from territory that it controls, including UNICEF, the World Health Organisation, UNHCR, Norwegian Church Aid and others from Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Germany, and France.

These aid agencies were banned, according to Al Shabaab, because they were “fostering secularism”, “amplifying the refugee crisis”, “financing, aiding, and abetting subversive groups seeking to destroy the basic tenets of Islamic penal system” and “undermining the livelihoods and cultural values of the population.”

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Durban COP expectations hit rock bottom as African and island states reap the whirlwind

November 27th, 2011

Two years ago the COP at Copenhagen was massive news with much made of the fact that this was probably the last opportunity to sort out a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol – which runs out at the end of 2012 and famously remains unsigned by the USA.

That opportunity, of course, came and went, as did COP16 at Cancun in Mexico and now we are on to COP17 in Durban, which opens tomorrow with expectations so low that they are practically invisible.  One measure of the failure to get any successor to Kyoto is that no one now seems to expect that to happen.

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Would three plane crashes an hour, every hour, get your attention?

November 9th, 2011

It’s not very often that a simple analogy can capture and dramatise a complex phenomenon.  But we were offered one yesterday at PA International’s ‘Combating Malnutrition through Sustainable Interventions’ conference in Brussels.

Amir Mahmoud Abdulla, Chief Operating Officer of the World Food Programme, turned the dry statistic that 3.5 million children die each year from malnutrition into a gripping and moving story.

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More bad news for Africa as carbon emissions soar

November 7th, 2011

African countries prone to floods, droughts and cyclones – and that’s most of them – had another dose of bad news last week when the latest global carbon emissions data was released  by the US Department of Energy.

Emissions in 2010 jumped by the biggest amount on record – so much for the fine words of the Copenhagen and Cancun summits.

This means that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst-case scenario outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just four years ago.  And that means that the risk of extreme weather events has also risen.  Since these extreme weather events disproportionately affect poorer countries in general and Africa in particular, the inability of the developed world – and that includes China and India who are now both major emitters – to reduce emissions has a direct effect on African lives and livelihoods.

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Loan containers provide instant secure storage in Dadaab

October 11th, 2011

Two containers loaned by Advance Aid are being used in the Dadaab refugee camp as a logistics base.  The containers provide instant secure storage and, being insulated, also remain relatively cool.

You can read the full story here.

And this is one of the containers in situ:

 

Instant secure storage at Dadaab

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Drought warnings in the Horn of Africa ignored for a year – now 747s have to fly in with emergency goods

July 18th, 2011

‘Communication problems’ meant that warnings one year ago forecasting a drought in the Horn of Africa were ignored by planners who could have prepared a timely response.  The result is a massive airlift costing huge sums of money.

No one is in any doubt that the drought that is hitting the Horn of Africa at the moment is a major humanitarian crisis but compare and contrast these two stories that relate to it.

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